All Work and No Play? Part 1

Where will your first year take you?

With October fast approaching, the prospective Yorkie will begin to witness the disbanding of their home social group, as each member leaves for pastures academic. Due to our generous term lengths you will be the last one standing, or sleeping, depending on how you choose to spend your holidays. Come late September, phone calls from your absent nearest and dearest will start to flood in, complete with accounts of events sparing no details. Such stories will fill you with both delight and apprehension, and you will mentally begin to embark upon the most surreal experience of your life. For the vast majority of you, this will be the first time that you have lived away from home, in independent utopia, as a ‘responsible’ adult. As a consequence of this inherent freedom, many of you may feel the need to engage in activities that you may have not have had the opportunity to do so previously, but you should take heed, for letting a child loose in a toy store can result in enduring, and less than desirable consequences. Here are a few things to bear in mind before you embark upon an expedition into the unknown, alcohol drenched, sleep deprived, world of a university student.

Congratulations, you’ve achieved what you set out to achieve. You should be very proud of yourself, for you are now a student at one of the top ten universities in the country. You have achieved outstanding results. Some of you worked hard for them, some of you did not. You have spent the previous decade of your educational life studying compulsory drivel you may well have despised. As the years passed, you were given more and more opportunity to choose the subjects you were interested in, or, more importantly, to drop those you in which you were not. Year after year, you would get closer to your final destination, but, like Tantalus, you would never quite reach it. Well, here you are, you have reached your destination. You’re majoring in the subject you always wanted to, but is the pursuit of academic excellence all that university life is about? If you think yes, think again. University is a way of living, a way of being. Yes, your subject is important, but some would argue that the experience is more so. This is the time of your life, during which you will form enduring bonds that will last a life time, bonds that will transcend those of friendship, becoming more akin to those of family. I can assure you, without any doubt, should you choose to miss out on the social aspects of university life, you will regret it. Being blinded by apprehension, or crippled by shyness, is no excuse, for all of your fellow animals have been cast onto the same ark. I am not for one minute suggesting that you overlook your academic commitments, for most people are not of that rare species that can go out clubbing most nights, shun their lectures and seminars, then write an outstanding essay, or own an exam, fuelled entirely on a cocktail of red bull and pro-plus pills. If you treat your social life as a paramount priority, do not expect to excel in your reading, but treat your course as the be all and end all, and don’t expect to be tagged in many Facebook photos. A first is a thinking man’s degree; a third is a drinking man’s degree.

First day, you’ve moved in; time to go about settling into your new home. My advice is to unpack your essentials and your essentials only. Spend too much time organising your room and you will miss out on valuable meet and greet time. Personally, I did not completely unpack until week seven, but I was perhaps a slow starter! The point is, go and meet your fellow students. As the opening days pass, the amateur Attenborough will begin to notice two absolute extremes, two antitheses, beginning to emerge; one, the terribly outgoing party animal, the other, the introverted academic. The party animal endures the dark of day in order to live the light of night. Labelled as the weird kid, the Brigadoon of students, the academic will rarely emerge from his/her room to take an organic smoothie from the fridge, maybe then choosing to exchange the odd greeting with their fellow kitchen mates, then disappearing, leaving behind a room of silent speculation. In hindsight, it is more desirable to strike a fine balance, sinking somewhere into the anonymous abyss that lies between these two very real stereotypes, rather than becoming one of them, but Hind did not have perfect twenty twenty vision, for, in reality, you will find yourself inclined further towards one or the other. After a few weeks, you will discover, as I did, just which side you lean towards. My alco-academic leaning dawned upon me once a friend asked me, ‘what do you have on tomorrow?’ I responded, ‘Ziggy’s’; head, meet desk. He wanted to know how many lectures I had, not parties.

This friend would become my best friend at university, but, rather interestingly, he was not one of the fourteen people on my corridor, nor was he even one of the hundreds in my college, or on my course. He lived, a fifteen minute walk away, in Alcuin. I lived in Goodricke. I am a mathematician, yet a large proportion of my closest friends are English students. One of these friends, a girl I am living with this year, I did not meet until the second term. My point is, one need not restrict one’s social group to those whom one meets in Freshers’ week. University is a three year experience for most. Whilst Freshers’ week will be perhaps the most eventful of your life, you certainly should not feel as though you have to become best friends with your block/flatmates and then slip into hermit like absence if they are not the people you wished they would be, but do take care not to become too friendly with these flatmates, for there is that one major taboo of shitting on one’s own doorstep.

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